Many communication systems rely on cryptography to ensure message secrecy and authenticity for communications that occur between two or more network communication nodes. In particular, some networks that employ a shared communication medium are susceptible to eavesdropping by attackers who can receive any encrypted or non-encrypted communications.
Prior art embodiments enable encrypted communications using either public-key/private-key or symmetric key cryptographic systems. However, for many applications, such as embedded systems, the public-key/private-key prior art techniques are impractically complex. Symmetric key cryptography, in which two or more parties use a single shared secret key to perform cryptographic operations, is often preferable to enable two or more nodes that use a shared communication bus to generate shared keys even in the presence of an attacker. However, some attackers may reduce the effectiveness of shared key generation processes by becoming an impostor for a legitimate node and participating in the same shared key generation process as the other nodes in the network to determine the shared key. Consequently, improvements to key generation techniques that enable authentication of the nodes that participate in the generation of shared secret keys over a shared communication medium that is susceptible to an attacker would be beneficial.